Today, UNIX has gained enormous popularity (much hyped) through the works of Linux and the GNU Project. I feel very strongly against the Linux hype you see these days. When I hear people call Linux a "Windows alternative", I want to shoot them. Those people at, say, ZDNet make me sick. Windowsusers love to run the mouth about Linux, when really they should make up their minds: join the community or let the fuck alone. If Linux becomes a popular consumer OS, you'll see for yourself, until then please stop bullshitting. Do you see any OEMcomputers shipping with Linux? Do you see people buying them? Do you see suckers getting those boxed Red HatCDs at CompUSA? Do they know what to do with them, do they throw them out a week later?

[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972-1974, making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world - and since 1996 the variant called Linux has been at the cutting edge of the open source movement. Many people consider the success of Unix the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an opposing point of view). See Version 7, BSD, Linux.

Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately `UNIX' or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the `UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in deference to dmr's wishes.

The MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project was an attempt by MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs to create a second-generation timesharing system based on MIT's CTSS. Eventually, Bell Labs dropped out of the project and this left one Bell Researcher, Ken Thompson with little to do. Finding a discarded PDP-7, he decided to write a smaller version of the MULTICS project in what was the customary systems development language at the time, ASM. Thomposon's project earned the name UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service) from Brian Kernighan as a joke on MULTICS but it stuck and eventually became..Unix.

His collegues were quite impressed with his effort and soon after, Dennis Ritchie joined Thompson and decided to move Unix to the more modern PDP-11/20 which would greatly help its later success. To do this, Richie and Thompson rewrote the whole system in a new language created by Richie, C. Then in 1974 Richie and Thompson wrote their landmark paper about Unix recieving the ACM Turing Award for their efforts. This event only helped stir interest in Unix and soon universities (Most happened to use the PDP-11/20s) from around the United States were requesting copy's of the Unix source code from AT&T. Since AT&T was forbidden by the government to enter the computer market, they willingly gave out the source for a modest licensing fee.

Eventually Version 6 came around and was replaced by Version 7 (Microsoft's Xenix was based on it), the first truly portable version of Unix. However, it was during the time of Version 6 that the one of the most significant changes in Unix history would occur. The University of California Berkeley had acquired the Unix code and modified the code significantly as well as adding many utilities such as vi, csh and Pascal and Lisp compilers creating the BSD distro. Berkeley Unix was well funded by ARPA and other government grants and as such was chosen to create the Internet protocols of today (TCP/IP).

By the 3BSD release the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) lead by Marshall Kirk McKusick at Berkeley had managed to port it to the VAX and eventually the last relelase 4.4BSD before they dissolved in 1992.

This would prove to split the Unix community in 1/2 with some adhering to AT&T's "System V" standard and other to BSD's standards. This was resolved with the creation of POSIX to make all Unix systems compatable with each other by creating a standard that all Unix variants must comply with.

Today, Unix runs most of the world's most powerful servers and has become a multimillion dollar industry. All built on the side project of Ken Thompson.